← Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
#269 | Why Having Big Feelings About a Tiny Issue Doesn’t Mean Something’s Wrong With You as an HSP
00:17:35
Are your emotions really “too much”—or are they trying to tell you something important? If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by intense feelings and wondered if they’re a flaw, this episode is your reminder that your emotions might actually be...
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Todd Smith
By the end of this episode, you'll discover why your big emotions aren't a weakness, but your biggest strength. Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I'm your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I'm a highly sensitive person myself. In this episode, you'll discover how a time where I felt like my emotions were too much actually revealed an important message about my internal alignment, the hidden cost of trying to tone yourself down and get rid of the feeling, and how to start seeing your deep emotions as inner wisdom, not emotional failure. Welcome to this edition of Self Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. Let me tell you a story about an emotional weekend that I had about a month or so ago. It started out actually with excitement. I was planning some things in my business and one of the things that I was looking at was creating some new courses. And I love creating courses. It's something that I've always enjoyed doing and it's fun for me. And I was getting kind of excited about it. I came up with a list of different courses I could create and I felt satisfied with it. It's like, okay, cool, this sounds like a good new direction for me. And I went on about my weekend, moved into, you know, non work and was just going about life. And I noticed started slowly, but I noticed it started coming up from inside like this emotion like, like really started building up to be like a really strong emotion. And I was feeling like I didn't want to, I didn't want to like get up, I didn't want to do anything. I was, just went through my chores and just did the, went through the motions, cut the grass, cleaned the house, did all that. But I felt like, oh my God, it's like a hundred pound weight on my back. And I'm, I was just like, what the heck's going on? And I noticed that my mind was, was kind of going back to this little idea of creating these courses that I had come up with on Friday. And, and of course everything was bleak, you know, because my, my emotions were so sour and I didn't know what was going on. Maybe I'm just looking at that great idea with, with just a kind of dark glasses on and I'm seeing it through those dark glasses and I really just didn't know what was true, what was up, what was down, anything like that. And it went on, you know, like, I started getting annoyed with my partner, started finding, like, little flaws with everything, and it was basically a huge drama, right? And here's what we, as highly sensitive people, sometimes will do with that, because we do feel emotions deeply and it. And we do get into drama, and we can sometimes think there's something wrong with us. You know, that's the feeling like, oh, man, why am I so sensitive? What's going on? Obviously, this is such. Something really tiny that my mind is obsessing on and making a big deal out of. We can end up being really hard on ourselves. So anyway, what happened as that. That evolved? I went to bed on, like, Sunday night, and I was just lying there, not falling asleep, and. And I was thinking more about this. This course idea and the projects and of creating these courses, and I started noticing, like, something wasn't right about that idea. Like, what is it? There's something not right here. And this is where my emotions were pointing me. And I wasn't even aware of it. But as I kept looking, I kept seeing more and more. It's like, what's going on? Oh, you actually don't want to create a new course right now? Like, what? You know, like, that was a. Sounded crazy to me because I think I like creating courses, but the reality was I didn't want to. And I think it was due to the fact that it would be a lot of work, that there's other more pressing things like that I would rather work on first. And I started noticing I actually really want to do more private sessions with people because I really enjoy that too. And there's just an immediate connection, fulfillment. There's no homework. There's no long timetable for getting it done. And this was like, a revelation for me because I've always downplayed private sessions in my business and always upplayed creating courses and community and all that, which I also love. But I think what happened was I was getting out of balance, and it was like, too much. And then when I thought about going even further and create another course, it was just like, no. They're like, my whole body just said no. And this is where I kind of thank myself for being a highly sensitive person because it was some little tiny thing. It was something that, you know, it's really not something that I have to worry about. It's like, it's minor. It's in the future. But because of that depth of processing and because of that Emotional connection. I started being aware of something inside of myself in a way that I could act on it in a very quick way. And so I changed my approach. I decided I'm not going to create any new courses. I'm going to keep what I have and I'm going to just go down that road. And it felt like relief. It felt like, oh, that's what I was trying to hear. And that was what I was being kind of screamed at me from inside with all this emotion. But when I could actually listen to it, there was a message there. And when I followed it, even just mentally, it was like, oh, now I can relax. Now I'm back in my groove again. And it's a new groove. This is like transformation of probably a decade of having a different approach. Courses first, private session second. Now I'm flipping that and it's like, wow, private sessions first, courses second. Like what? Who am I? So this is where we as highly sensitive people can have big feelings about tiny issues. And it doesn't mean that something's wrong with us. It just means we're picking up on things, we're amplifying that inner experience and we're then able to possibly see that and act on it. So if you try to tone down your big feelings, there is a cost of that. And what happens is you will start to disconnect from your inner intelligence big emotions, even the painful ones like grief and anger and overwhelm, they carry important information. They're like messengers. And when you push them away or you minimize them, you also dull your ability to notice why they're there and what they're trying to show you. And so you end up losing your intuitive clarity. You start dulling your emotional insight and the deeper truths inside of your system don't ever get a chance to surface. Also, if you try to tone down your emotions as a highly sensitive person, you start to reinforce a kind of internalized shame that many of us have, which is that we shouldn't feel what we feel. And we start sending ourselves a message like there's something wrong with us. And over time this can become a chronic kind of self doubt where we're self editing all the time and feeling ashamed of ourselves. Not just ashamed of our emotions, but about who we are. And that can erode your self trust and your self acceptance. And these are things that are essential for resilience if you're a highly sensitive person. So another thing that happens if you try to tone things down is you start to dim your emotional range. And so problem Is you can't selectively numb your emotions. When you suppress your intensity to avoid discomfort, you. You also become less able to access joy and creativity and connection and passion and all of those things. So life becomes more manageable, but it's also more muted. It's like you're on some kind of a drug that's just keeping you in this little zone. But maybe that's not the full value of life. And if you can be okay with the swing of emotions, then there's a lot of richness there as well that's easy to overlook. The other thing, if you try to tone down your emotions as a highly sensitive person, you can end up stalling your emotional growth. Fully feeling your emotions without getting lost in them, if possible, is what allows you to move through them and allows them to evolve. And so avoidance will do just the opposite, will keep you stuck and will keep you, you know, buried under physical tension, burnout, emotional shutdown. Negative emotions thrive in darkness when you're not paying attention to them. And if you can bring them into the light, then they can bring their message to you, they can fulfill their purpose, and they can settle back down into a more peaceful experience. When you don't deal with your emotions, when you push them down over too long of a time, they can have their ways of kind of coming back up. And sometimes it's even worse than if you'd listen to them the first time. You know, the analogy I always say is, like, you start, like life starts by whispering something to you, then it speaks in a little louder voice, and then it may start yelling to get your attention, and then it finally may just hit you to get your attention. And so we have an advantage as highly sensitive people because we can hear the whisper. And if you act on the whisper, you can avoid all the drama later on. So how do we start seeing these deep emotions as inner wisdom instead of emotional failure? I think the first thing to do is to redefine what too much really means. You may have been told, you may have just come to the conclusion yourself that you're too sensitive or that you're too emotional or that you're overreacting. But those labels, those judgments, really say more about other people's comfort levels. Even if you came to the conclusion yourself that you're too emotional, who are you? What is that in reference to? Is it in reference to your own actual experience, or is it in reference to what other people will think if you're emotional? And so coming back to your own experience can be a great way to just start seeing your emotions as wise or valuable instead of something that's wrong. You can think maybe like, this emotion isn't too much, it's just deeper than others are used to. And that's okay. Depth isn't a flaw. It's a sign that your nervous system picks up on. On more things and it feels those things all the way through. That's what it means to be a highly sensitive person. So how else can we start seeing deep emotions as inner wisdom instead of emotional failure? One way is to pause and listen to those emotions instead of trying to fix them. We're often in such a big hurry to get rid of negativity, to get rid of negative emotions, to get rid of that. That pain that we think is so bad. Like, what would it be like to listen to those emotions instead? To give them space to ask something like, what is this emotion trying to tell me? You know, sadness may be pointing to something that needs grief, or anger may reveal a boundary that got crossed or overwhelmed. Maybe your nervous system saying, slow down. So big feelings are often signals, and they're not necessarily problems to solve. They're something to bring awareness to and to get curious about, because they can teach you a lot and then finally notice the wisdom afterwards. Like, when I look back on that event last month and the emotion I had and seemed so dramatic and everything, like, now I see it, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that that big emotional alarm clock went off and I was able to sit with it long enough to hear that I was going in a direction that wasn't fully aligned with what I was actually feeling and wanting at that time. So if you do this, just notice how your recent emotional experiences may have been teaching you something. Like, what did you learn after feeling that? What did you become clearer about? What did that emotion uncover? If you're aware of it, you'll start to associate emotion with insight instead of judging it as failure. So the feeling I'm left with today is that big emotions are your biggest strength as an hsp. Sounds funny. Why would that be? It's like if you think of a microscope, maybe an electron microscope. Why is that microscope so powerful? Because it can magnify everything, thousands, even millions of times. When you are tuned into emotions, when you feel emotions the way highly sensitive people do, you are tuned in to subtle, subtle things, important things. And this is our biggest strength. So in this episode, we looked at how I was kind of stuck in this feeling of being too much last month, where my emotions just became really big and how when I sat with them and let them be without trying to fix them, they ended up revealing an important message about my internal alignment. And I'm grateful for that. We also looked at the hidden cost of trying to tone down your emotions, trying to tone yourself down to try to get rid of the feeling. And what happens is you disconnect from your inner intelligence and you also reinforce this feeling of shame that there's something wrong with you. And we also looked at how to start seeing your deep emotions as inner wisdom, not emotional failure. And we saw that you can do that by redefining what too much really is. You know, when you really look at it closely, it's just deeper feeling more deeply. That's not something. That's not a failure. Not at all. And you can ask your emotions what are they trying to tell you? And you can notice the wisdom that gets uncovered when you look back on an emotional situation. This can start to give you confidence that emotions are there to serve you and they are a good thing. Thanks for listening. It's always great to explore what it means to be an HSP with you. This podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test@truinnerfreedom.com you'll also find a link in the show notes. The test will reveal your unique sensitivity profile, including how your nervous system naturally responds to stimulation, circulation, emotions, social energy, and more. You'll also gain a clearer picture of how stress might be amplifying that sensitivity. Take the HSP Stress Test now. It's a powerful first step on your journey to true inner freedom.